Directors who basically had one good movie and then never matched that success again?
Michael Cimino - The Deer Hunter
Behn Zeitlin - Beasts of the Southern Wild
Neill Blompkamp - District 9
Richard Kelly - Donnie Darko
Tobe Hooper - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Poltergeist is basically not his movie)
Josh Trank
Chronicle was a hit and a great movie. After that he made two movies. Fantastic 4 was a big flop and Capone flopped too. Nothing after that.
I agree. Fan4stic was awful but I’ve wondered how much of that was Trank’s fault; sounds like it would’ve been bad regardless. Capone is just a weird movie, but not weird enough…why make a biopic and paint your subject as a helpless pantswetter? But it could’ve been more Lynchian. It’s just not memorable.
shareI've never seen his F4 movie, but Capone was just really boring. I rarely stop a movie once I've started but I couldn't get through that.
Btw, I think that Blomkamp's first three movies were solid. I know that I'm in the minority but I think that Chappie is his best, I love that movie.
I heard he vandalized the home he was staying at during the F4 shooting.
shareCimino a one-hit wonder? Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Heaven's Gate are amazing films. The latter is a masterpiece, though admittedly it wasn't exactly a financial success!
To answer your question:
Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine)
Marlon Brando (One-Eyed Jacks)
Herk Harvey (Carnival of Souls)
James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross)
Larissa Shepitko (The Ascent)
Charles Laughton (The Night of the Hunter)
Mary Harron (American Psycho)
Kerry Conran - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)!
shareThere’s a much larger story behind Poltergeist than the urban legends of Spielberg’s command over the project. In reality, Hooper’s formative role in conceiving and then directing the picture was outwardly buried. Hooper goes into detail about this here:
“When I started shooting Funhouse, Steven called me in Florida, and asked me to come back - there was something that he wanted me to do. I came back, and he wanted me to do a follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the film that eventually came to be ET, though what he described to me was very different. I explained to him that it really wasn't my kind of thing, but I'd always wanted to do a film about ghosts and poltergeists. He said, “Fantastic,” and at that point we set about creating Poltergeist. We worked on it in London while he was shooting Raiders. So I have literally been on this project for eight years… I didn't have a conclusion originally, it was a matter of wrapping up the ideas, finishing it. The idea of the girl kidnapped by the dead came late in development, and that was Steven's and mine… Steven did write the screenplay and there are other credits on there, but it came down to Steven and myself sitting at his house. He wrote the screenplay, and we gathered around a poltergeist textbook for the research, which was actually Robert Wise's research book that he had on The Haunting.”
Why the round denial of this? Well, for the probability of branding, for one. Then there’s what happened on set… Spielberg was rightly reprimanded for being too obtrusive on the set (the same thing happened on his previous producing effort, Robert Zemeckis’s USED CARS) and this incident likely informed a resentment against Hooper for daring to control the set.
An actor’s account of a pivotal incident:
“The first day of filming something happened, and I've even talked about it when the DGA investigated it... it was the scene with the special effects with the small teapot again. That first day, Tobe would whisper something in our ear and then he would shout action and we would do the scene. Then Steven would shout “Cut” and Steven approached and would whisper something else in our ear. And that continued for about six minutes and Beatrice Straight said: "One director, please. This has to end." And it literally continued for about six or seven minutes, you know, half an hour at most, and she just said, “That's not how we do this. We have one director around here.” And after that, Tobe did everything. Steven had a lot to contribute. As Oliver said, it was his script. I mean, yes... it was Tobe."
I’d venture that this made many people upset, people who wanted to work with Spielberg, not a nobody like Hooper. Thus, they’d spin their stories and ignore everything that pointed to Hooper’s influence. All actors assert not only was Hooper always directing, but that Spielberg’s presence dwindled to nil by the end of the shoot.
Jennifer Kent - The Babadook
shareHer second movie was really good, but nobody saw it.
shareIf It's The Nightingale you're talking about, I saw it because I liked The Babadook, It may be interesting for Australians I don't know, for the rest of the world I think it is dull and it looks cheap production
shareThe Nightingale is fantastic. Much better than The Babadook. And it doesn't look cheap at all. It's a dark and brutal movie, but I think it's beautiful looking, the scenery and all.
shareAren’t the Wachowskis considered one hit wonders? I personally enjoyed Reloaded but I think the general consensus is that only their original Matrix movie is good.
shareI don't really believe the claims that Hooper didn't direct Poltergeist. Just watching other Hooper movies like Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars, I think he was capable of having done Poltergeist. Visually, they have a pretty similar aesthetic.
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